Žižek claimed that Stalinism was fundamentally more
evil than Nazism. While in Nazism the victim was clear (Jews, Roma, the mentally
ill), in Stalinism it was totally unpredictable who would suffer elimination,
and the chance of it was higher the higher up one was in the hierarchy of the
communist nomenclatura. The revolution devoured its children. Žižek is at a
loss to explain this, he said.
Here is an explanation. It goes back to Rousseau’s
‘general will’, from his book on the ‘Social contract’ (1762). There, every
individual has to surrender its natural liberty to submit to the indivisible collective
taken as sovereign, representing the interest of the united people, devoid of
any particular partial interest. If there is a clash between individual
perception, opinion, interest and the general will, the latter is always right,
and the individual has to submit to it willingly.
He wrote, literally: ‘.. when the collective opinion
contrary to mine wins (in the determination of the general will), that proves
nothing else than that I was mistaken, and that what I estimated as being the
general will wasn’t’[i]
Rousseau could not stand the messiness, the erraticism
of democracy, where people may submit to what is democratically decided but
still stick to their conviction and strive to amend the decision. He wrote,
literally: ‘.. the long debates, the discussions, announce the emergence of
particular interests and the decline of the state’.[ii]
What is still, or again, the relevance of this?
Populists on the right also demand conformance to the general will of the
people, or else be excluded or cut loose from the law. And the leader next
claims that he is the unique voice of the general will.
But who are the leaders? Who is the true interpreter
of the general will, untainted by particular position, interest or opinion?
Anyone claiming leadership or aspiring to it can rightly be accused not being
able to satisfy such purity, because no one is.
Hence the trials and tribulations of the ‘virtuous’
Jacobine terror of the French revolution, which arose against the established
interests and position of the king, nobility and clergy. No new special
interest could be permitted to raise its head, which was cut off when it did.
There is a ‘Catch 22’ at play here. To recall: In the
novel ‘Catch 22’, by Joseph Heller, a soldier at war has the right to be sent
home when mentally unstable. But when you apply for it, you prove you are
rational, not mentally unstable. So, no-one gets sent home for mental
instability. In the present context: the wrong people rise to the top. The top
requires people who set aside their personal ambition but when you do that you
do not aspire to the top. So, people at the top are prone to be purged.
That, I think was what was also going on in Stalinism,
though intensified by Stalin’s paranoia. It explains the arbitrariness of
elimination, and the trials in which perpetrators had to admit guilt and submit
to judgement. That also happened under Mao, and Pol Pot.
Behind this also lay, I think, the Hegelian notion of
an inexorable march of history towards the realization of the absolute spirit, at
the ever receding horizon, in comparison to which human life here and now is
insignificant and to be sacrificed when opportune.
Like Kantian ethics, like the categorical imperative,
this general will is to be free from personal interest or satisfaction, is
abstracted from human nature and worldly contingency, hanging in the cold
stratosphere, far from life on earth. I quote Rousseau again: ‘The law
considers the subjects … as abstract, never a human being as individual, nor as
a certain particular’.[iii]
[i] On the social contract, book
9, chapter 2, my translation.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid., book 2, chapter 6. Let me add that I do appreciate the
principle that the law should apply equally to all, in establishing guilt, but
in assigning punishment personal circumstance should be taken into account.
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